The thoughts become darker as the centuries fly by. The armed nation state arises, concentrating power in the hands of small elites with conquest uppermost on their minds. The Industrial Revolution arrives with a deafening clamor, rending the social fabric. Scientific progress propels the nations of Europe, bristling with new armaments, into two wars of annihilation. Free-market economics in the postwar world spreads like a disease. As Osborne moves closer to the world we all inhabit, the rumblings grow louder, the criticism more pointed.
Osborne sees Western history as a series of transformations — social, philosophical and economic — that impel citizens rich and poor to look for new ways of organizing their world, the better to serve new desires and needs. His sympathies lie with the common folk, and with the pre-industrial past. His never-never land can be found in the early Middle Ages, "a period of diversity and mutual tolerance in which local culture, craftsmanship and scholarship could thrive within a continent-wide network, with few boundaries between nations, kingdoms, ethnic and religious orthodoxies, and little central control."
By contrast most of the developments since the Industrial Revolution have, in Osborne's view, led to stratified, intolerant, self-obsessed, materialistic societies dominated by corporations and, in their relations with the rest of the world, intent on imposing alien Western ideas like the nation state. In a grudging sort of way Osborne documents the growing prosperity of the West over the last two centuries, but never without noting, as he does in a discussion of the US in the 1920s, that under industrial capitalism "the cohesion of communities, customary arrangements, family loyalties must all be sacrificed to the continual churning need for better, cheaper, newer goods to be brought to market."
As he speeds through the history of the past 20 years, Osborne goes on something of a rant, teeing off against elitist art, abstract philosophy, the injection of moral categories into foreign policy, privatization of public industries and virtually everything else in sight, including and especially Western rationalism, a guiding light for 2,500 years.
"The fundamental western belief that there are rational ways of organizing the world which will bring benefit to all has been at the root of every human-made catastrophe that has overtaken us," he writes, "yet many of us still believe that we have a bounden duty to bring our simplistic, universalizing, 'progressive' systems of government, economics, education, policing, judiciary and morals to every part of every society on the planet."
Whew. Only at the end of the book does it become clear that Osborne has been engaged in a very strange project. While painstakingly reconstructing the imposing, intricate edifice of Western civilization, he has planted a series of explosive charges. And then, when the job is done, he lights the fuses and watches as the entire thing collapses into dust.
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